Out of Austria
by rebecca-in-blue
Summary: The von Trapps might've made it look easy to win a singing contest, evade Nazis, hide in a convent, flee your homeland, and climb mountains – but it wasn't.
1. Chapter 1

_The Sound of Music_ has been one of my favorite movies for as long as I can remember. As kids, my sister and I memorized every word and used to act it out (with the two of us playing all seven von Trapp kids – and every other role!). So, this story has been some time in coming. It will feature some "missing scenes" from the family's escape, and the focus will shift between a few different characters.

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><p><em><em>L'chi lach, to a land that I will show you<br>Leich l'cha, to a place you do not know  
>L'chi lach, on your journey, I will bless you<br>And you will be a blessing, l'chi lach  
><em>_– Debbie Friedman, _L'chi Lach_ (based on Genesis 12)

"We've got to get out of Austria..." Georg's voice was sad but quietly determined, "...and this house. Tonight." He allowed himself only a moment to gaze around, one last time, at the font hall of the mansion where he'd lived for so long – where his children were born, where his wife died. He could practically see the ghosts of memories and old times fluttering down the hallway, past the artwork and all the other fine things that he must leave behind.

Georg couldn't have care less for the possessions and wealth that he would lose by fleeing his homeland overnight, but it did seem cruel that just now, just after Maria had made this grand house into a home again, filling with happiness and music once more, now they were all being forced to leave it, probably forever. He'd told Elsa once that he left his home so often because he was searching for a reason to stay. Well, now he had finally found a reason – or rather, he'd realized that seven reasons had been there all along, but now the Nazis were giving him a reason to leave again.

He took one last look around, and then he turned away, knowing in his heart that this house – indeed, this entire part of his life – already belonged to the past.

**::**

Upstairs, he found a travel satchel in the bottom bureau drawer and hastily began shoving some of his most expensive things inside – his silver square cufflinks, his gold-plated pocket watch and matching chain, his black, long-stemmed cigar holder, trimmed in real elephant ivory. He knew that he might need them to bribe officials in Vienna and at the border. For good measure, he added some small wads of money, too. He threw all these inside without a second glance, but he hesitated when he came to his war medals.

Maria hurried into their bedroom just then from the east wing, where she'd been helping the children get ready to leave. "Georg, is there enough gasoline in the motor-car," she started to ask him, "or should we..."

But the question died on her lips when she saw Georg's ashen face as he picked up his war medals. Maria had seen them only twice before – once at the party that he threw for Baronness Schraeder, and once at their wedding. Georg had polished them and worn them so proudly then. It felt jarring to see them now, in such a grim situation, but there again was the golden Military Merit Medal for Bravery, engraved with Emperor Charles's profile and the Latin words for__honor__ and __praise__, and the silver Knight's Cross of the Order of Maria Theresa, with its thick ribbon in the pattern of the Austrian flag. Maria knew that this one was the most prestigious war medal in all Austria and had been presented to Georg by Emporer Charles himself.

Georg's hands trembled as he ran his fingers over the engravings in the cool metal, and that jarred Maria even more. Her husband was such a strong, confident man, as firm as a stone in his beliefs of right and wrong, which was why he refused to work with the Nazis. But his expression now was so uncertain, so vulnerable...

Maria flashed back to that awful night during their honeymoon – the night of the Anschluss. They had huddled around the radio set in their luxury hotel room, listening to the BBC radio broadcast. It was a perfectly calm, pleasant night in Paris, with a warm breeze fluttering the curtains of their balcony overlooking the Champs-Élysées, but Maria felt ice-cold as she listened to the news and saw Georg's reaction to it. The color had drained from his face when the reporter announced that Chancellor Schuschnigg had been forced to resign, and tears had actually filled his eyes when they heard the crowds cheering as Nazi troops marched into Vienna.

With a heavy sigh, Georg set his medals down on top of the bureau. "I'll leave them," he said, his voice soft but strong, and his hands steady again. "I can't bring them. It would be too dangerous."

Maria knew that he was right, that it would be dangerous for their family if Georg brought his medals. The Nazis were already pretending that Austria was Germany now and always had been. It would be bad enough, if they were all caught trying to escape, but if Georg were found with Austrian war medals on him...

Yet Maria also knew that her husband felt torn apart by the thought of leaving those medals behind. She knew that to Georg, they symbolized much more than victory and heroics. They stood for Austria itself, a country that Georg had been willing to die for.

She stepped over to him and put one hand on his arm. He looked up at her, his blue eyes more distraught than she'd ever seen them, but she said as cheerfully as she could manage, "Perhaps you don't have to leave them behind. You forget that I can sew my own clothes. Where's my needle and thread?"

She found them in the top bureau drawer, and her quick fingers threaded the needle in the blink of an eye. Georg took off his coat and wrapped his medals up in a handkerchief, folding them carefully, so they wouldn't clink against each other and make noise. In no time at all, Maria had sewn them into the lining of his coat. The seams were perfect, all but invisible, and there was no bulge in his coat to make any officials suspicious. Even when Georg shook it out, the medals made no noise.

"Maria," he said, fumbling for words, slightly stunned. She almost laughed at the surprised expression on his face, which was so remniscent of the look that he gave her months ago, when she brazenly told him that she wasn't about to answer to a whistle. "I can't tell you what this means..."

She just smiled and answered softly, "You don't have to. I know."

**::**

A few minutes later, they turned on the radio, hoping for news that might help them know which route to take out of Austria, but instead, Adolf Hitler was giving a speech. "We come here not as tyrants," he announced to some cheering crowd, "but as liberators. I — "

But that was as far as the Fuhrer got before Georg picked up the radio from the table and smashed it on the floor. It was a terrible display of temper, but Maria just smiled, because his hands weren't trembling anymore. Somehow, Maria felt certain that wherever they went, and whatever happened to them on the way, they would be all right, as long as they were all together, and as long as Georg's hands were so strong and certain.


	2. Chapter 2

I know that in the movie, the children called Maria "Mother" after she married their father. But that just made it too difficult to word this chapter, so in this story, the children are just calling her Maria (which I believe is what they called her after she became their stepmother in the play). I'm not entirely pleased with this chapter, mainly because I feel that Liesl is a bit OOC by being more aware of current events than she ever seemed to be in the movie. Still, I hope you'll enjoy it.

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><p><em><em>The leaves have come to turning, and the goose has gone to fly<br>And bridges are for burning, so don't you let that yearning pass you by  
><em>_—James Taylor, _Walking Man_

Maria had told them to pack, to get ready as quickly as they could, but Brigitta was standing perfectly still in front of the mirror atop her bureau, blinking at her reflection. She knew that she was wasting time, but she couldn't help it. Likely she would never see her reflection in this mirror again, and she wanted her last look to be a good one.

Brigitta could remember being so small that the top of her head didn't even clear the bottom of this mirror. Gradually, over the years, she grew tall enough to see her eyes, then her nose and mouth, and standing before it now, she could see her entire head and shoulders. It was a fine, expensive mirror, with an ornate silver frame. But that wasn't why Brigitta felt so attached to it.

She still didn't know exactly how Liesl had gotten a lock of their mother's hair. She only knew that Liesl had always had it, for as long as Brigitta could remember – a small lock of dark brown hair, tied with a faded pink ribbon. Liesl used to keep it in the jewelry box atop her vanity table, but Louisa and Brigitta had asked her to see it so often that a few years ago, she took it out and fastened it very carefully in the corner of this mirror, where all three of them could see it every day.

Since then, Brigitta had treasured the mirror and stood before it every morning, her eyes always darting to the corner to rest on that lock of her mother's hair – the exact same shade of dark-brown as hers.

Brigitta had only a few vague memories of her mother, and in one of them, she was lying in bed, pale and moaning from the scarlet fever that would soon kill her. Brigitta had tried to move to her mother's bedside, but a pair of men's legs in dark pants (her father's, probably) blocked her way, and another pair of hands (Frau Schmidt's, probaly) shooed her away.

Liesl and Louisa were older, of course, and they had proper memories of their mother as a happy, healthy woman who read them stories and sang them lullabies and did all the things that a mother was supposed to do. And though they were almost always happy to share these memories with Brigitta, she felt cheated, somehow, that her two older sisters could remember pleasant times with their mother, and her two younger sisters couldn't remember her at all, while Brigitta was stuck in the middle, stuck with that haunting image of her mother in her sickbed.

When she was Marta's age, she'd had a recurring dream in which she was sad and crying about something, and her mother picked her up and held her close and kissed her – all the things that her father never did. Her father had barely even looked at her in the long, lonely years before Fraulein Maria arrived.

If Maria was her new mother, what did that make the mother who had given birth to her and who was still watching over her from heaven? Brigitta supposed that she had two mothers now.

Brigitta was distracted from her thoughts when she saw Liesl standing behind her in the mirror. She expected her oldest sister to scold her for wasting precious time when she should've been packing, but instead, Liesl simply followed her gaze to the lock of their mother's hair in the corner of the mirror.

"I know," she said quietly. "I don't want to leave it behind, either." With that, she reached into the pocket of her skirt, and Brigitta gasped when she saw what she pulled from it – a tube of lipstick. _Lipstick_! Their father didn't allow his daughters to wear any makeup; it was one of his strictest rules. Of course, they'd all broken their father's rules quite often. What shocked Brigitta wasn't that Liesl had broken this one, but that she'd managed to keep it secret from her and Louisa.

"Where did you get that?" Brigitta asked in an astonished whisper.

Liesl glared at her. "None of your business," she snipped. She uncapped the tube and dumped out the lipstick, so that only the empty silver case remained. Then she reached past Brigitta and carefully unfastened their mother's hair from the mirror. She paused, looking down at the dark hair in her hand.

"It was just this time of year – the summer over, and school starting," she said in a soft, far-away voice. Brigitta and Louisa, who'd joined them from across the room when she saw Liesl taking their mother's hair off the mirror, both froze, listening in rapt silence, as they always did when Liesl talked about their mother. "My hair had grown very long over the summer, and Father wanted it trimmed before I went back to school. I must've been... six or seven, I think. I didn't want to have my hair cut. For some reason, I thought they would cut it all off, and it would be as short as Friedrich's. Mother explained to me that they were just going to trim it. She said, 'Here, I'll show you,' and she found a pair of scissors and cut off a little snippet of her own hair, right then and there."

She slipped the lock of hair safely inside her empty lipstick case, snapped the cap back on, and tucked it inside her pocket. "There," she said, "now we don't have to leave it behind. I hate the thought of Nazis in here, going through our things."

Brigitta hated the thought, too – big, rough soldiers with guns in her own room, pawing through her things. "Will they?" she asked Liesl.

Liesl titled her head, thinking. "Probably. They've been doing it in Germany, I think, when people flee their homes, like we're doing. Or sometimes, they'll even evict families from their homes, for no good reason at all. Our house is so nice that once we're gone, they'll probably confiscate all our property and set up a base here. Or some important official will get to live here." She added bitterly, "It'll be like a consolation prize for helping them invade Austria."

Louisa was practically shaking with fury at this. "Nazis in our house," she spat out. "Well, I know a way to make them sorry. I've still got some spiders. I was planning to put them in a jar and set them loose in Maria's bed, but then I never did, of course. You remember?"

Brigitta nodded. Louisa kept spiders in an empty fish-tank in their room and cared for them like pets. At one point, she'd tried keeping snakes in a different tank, but they were cold-blooded and keeping them heated had been too difficult, so she'd set them free in the western part of the garden, near the lake.

"But what are you going to do with them?" Brigitta asked. "Don't tell me you're going to bring them with us."

Louisa shook her head and grinned wickedly. "No, of course not. Last thing before we leave, I'm going to turn them loose in our room, for the Nazis to find later."

Brigitta felt like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. It was still very hard to leave everything behind, but it made her smile to know that their mother's hair would be coming with them – and it made her grin to picture Nazis uncovering a nest of spiders as they plundered their home.


	3. Chapter 3

I have mixed feelings about how this chapter turned out... but I hope you enjoy it anyway!

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><p><em><em>We all swing high. We all swing low.<br>We all have secrets people don't know.  
>We all have dreams we can't let go.<br>We want to be brave, so don't be afraid.  
><em>_– Matisyahu, "Live Like a Warrior"

Max had been his friend for years. Max was the Best Man at his wedding – twice. Max knew how he felt about the Nazis. He was there when Georg pulled the Nazi flag down from above his doorway and ripped it in two, right through the middle of the swastika. He was there when Georg received the summons to Bremerhaven. And yet Max did not really believe that the entire family could be fleeing the country until Georg came downstairs in an old set of travel clothes that he hadn't worn in years, and set a small bag at his feet.

Max's mouth actually fell open a bit. As he was still gaping for words, Georg looked at him and said, his voice shaky but firm, "Max... you should leave. You should leave and go to the concert hall right now. When they discover we're gone, I want you to be able to say truthfully that you knew nothing about it."

But Max began shaking his head before Georg had even finished. "No," he says, and his own voice is shaking too, but he goes on bravely, "No, I want to help you. If you're really... leaving, then I want to help you get away." Georg opened his mouth to protest, but Max cut him off, "Don't try to talk me out of it, Georg. I've already made up my mind. There must be something I can do, so put me to work."

Georg raised one hand to his forehead, feigning shock. "Am I going mad," he asked teasingly, "or did I just hear Max Detweiler ask to be put to work?"

And despite the circumstances, Max smiled. "You did — and he's never going to say those words again in his life, so you'd better take advantage of it."

**::**

As much as he tried to look calm, by the time they reached the concert hall, Georg was almost shaking with rage. Backstage, he heard himself make some excuse about needing to find Max and talk to him about what order they'll be performing in. It was a lie, but Maria just nodded. She seemed to understand that he needed to speak to Max privately. She was probably thinking the same thing that Georg was.

It was Franz. It had to have been Franz. Franz had found out that they were planning to leave the country, and he'd alerted Herr Zeller. How else could the man have known? How else could he have been waiting outside the front gates for them?

Franz had been his family's butler for such a long time. It was actually Agathe who had hired him, years ago, when she pregnant with Brigitta. She had placed an advertisement in the newspaper, interviewed about a dozen men for the position, and decided on Franz. Georg thought that perhaps he was angrier at Franz for that than anything else – for betraying his late wife's trust and making her seem like a poor judge of character.

Georg found Max in the wings, reviewing the program, and even though he was about to go onstage as master of ceremonies for the concert, Georg grabbed him and dragged him into a large storage closet nearby. It was crowded with old props, and Georg recognized the old oversized donkey's head from a production of__A Midsummer Night's Dream__ that had been performed on this very same outdoor stage, at the beginning of the summer. He'd taken Elsa to see it, even though comedies had hardly been to his taste then. Had it only been just last May?

Max looked bewildered, but before he could ask anything, Georg put gripped his shoulder with one hand and said, "Max... come with us, man."

Max's bewildered expression didn't change. He knew that Georg and his family were still planning to leave Austria – they had already discussed how they would sneak out after their final song, while Max was announcing the winners, and go to the abbey to hide – but Max coming with them had never been part of the plan.

"Her Zeller will be suspicious of you," Georg went on urgently. "He saw you trying to help us escape, and—"

"Georg, please," Max interrupted, "you shouldn't be worrying about me. I already had a talk with Herr Zeller. I told him that I was trying to get the von Trapps to the festival, and that I was trying to convince you and Maria to go on a singing tour with the children, and that I was going to act as your agent. I went on for some time about how much money you were going to make me. He knows I've no political convictions. He was completely convinced."

Georg pursed his lips. This next part wasn't easy to say, but it had to be said. He would never forgive himself if something happened to Max. For God's sake, he was a man who worked in show business and was friends with women like Elsa.

"Max," Georg said in a low voice, "you know that... we aren't the only reason why they'll be suspicious of you."

For a moment, Max was silent. The two of them had been friends for a long time, but even to Georg, Max had never once spoken aloud about his... lifestyle. But although neither of them had ever said the word, Georg had known for years what Max's tastes were. Of course, it didn't make a difference to him, and it was certainly no one's business but Max's own. But he knew that the Nazis didn't share that view.

Occasionally, at the glittering salons in Vienna where Elsa used to throw her parties, Georg had seen pairs of men sitting together in booths, and he could tell that they were men like Max. Once or twice, when he wasn't soaking himself in champagne and stumbling about the room to waltzes, he had even overheard rumors muttered in low, fearful voices. There were such dark rumors coming out of Germany. The Nazis were identifying and rounding up the Jews, the Gypsies, the homosexuals, the handicapped, the Jehovah's Witnesses...

The list had gone on for some time, and even in the party atmosphere, it had made Georg's blood run cold that the Nazis could hate so very many people. How could anyone have the energy to hate so much? How could there be such evil in the world?

What if Franz had learned of Max's secret? He would surely tell Herr Zeller, just as he had almost certainly informed him of the family's plan to escape. Max had always been extremely discreet about his lifestyle — he had to be — but he'd visited the von Trapp home often over the years, and Franz was no fool. He had played the part of the noble, loyal butler so well, and for so long, that Georg had fallen for it and let the man observe far too much. Franz had surely noticed how Max was never in the company of a woman, how he played silly games with the children as if he were still a child himself.

But now, Max looked shocked that Georg was even approaching the subject. "I told you," he said, his voice even more hushed than before, "I went on to him about how much money I was hoping to make from the von Trapp Family Singers. He thinks I love _money_ — and I do, of course. Everyone knows that. Max Detweiler loves _money_."

He turned on his heel to leave the closet, but then he immediately spun back around. "And I'll tell you something else, Georg," he went on. "It won't be always be like this. The Nazis aren't going to be in power forever. Things are going to change someday, and when they do, when this is all over, I'm going to go to Switzerland, or to wherever you are, and I'm going to make you take me out for a steak dinner at the most expensive restaurant I can find. I _promise_ you that."

Georg's heart seized up, and for a moment, he couldn't reply. How he loved the thought of seeing Max again someday, and treating the old money-sponge to dinner. How he wanted that to happen. Perhaps he was a fool to hope for such a thing, but if Max could speak of a bright future in such a dark time, then he could, too. Besides, if this moment was his last encounter with Max – God forbid, but if it was, Georg didn't want it to be a gloomy one.

"You would," he said, forcing himself to smile. "You know, the _real_ reason I'm leaving the country is so that I won't have to pay my telephone company for all those calls you made to Rome and Paris."

And despite the dire circumstances, Max laughed and clapped him on the shoulder as he swung open the door, and they stepped out of the closet together.


	4. Chapter 4

Dedicated to Maria von Trapp, Georg and Agathe's third child, who passed away on February 18, 2014 (while I was writing this chapter) at age 99. She was the last surviving one of the seven siblings, and was depicted as Louisa in the movie. This was an interesting note I found in an article about her death: _In 2008, she visited her former childhood home in Salzburg, for the first time since her family fled Austria in 1938. She found herself haunted by memories. "Our whole life is in here, in this house," she recalled as she walked its corridors. "Especially here in the stairwell, where we always used to slide down the railings."_

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><p><em><em>I took my love, and I took it down<br>I climbed a mountain, and I turned around  
>Oh mirror in the sky, what is love?<br>Can the child within my heat rise above?  
><em>_– Stevie Nicks, "Landslide"

The family's hike across the Alps – all nine of them, on foot, through the mountains, with few provisions – was a very difficult journey, and to Gretl especially, it seemed to last for a very long time.

It wasn't all bad. There were some pleasant moments on their journey, especially in the beginning. The first time that her father reached the top of a mountain with her sitting on his shoulders, Gretl was so stunned by the view that for a moment, she could only stare, her eyes and mouth both open wide. Then she found her voice, waved her arm in a wide arc in front of her, and cried, delighted, "Oh, look, look! You can see the whole world!" and her older siblings all laughed.

Another pleasant moment was the little valley between two mountain-peaks that was full of edelweiss. Gretl recognized the soft, white, star-shaped blossoms immediately – the flowers from her father's song – but she had never seen so many of them. The field was so thick with them that she could hardly even see the grass, and the air was so heady with their sweet smell that it almost made Gretl dizzy. She and Marta both gasped aloud when they came into sight of it.

Father said, "I suppose we can stop and rest here," and Maria smiled at her and Marta picking edelweiss and said, "Look at those faces. You'd think it was Christmas morning." Even Brigitta, who'd lately pretended that she was too grown-up to play with Marta and Gretl anymore, helped them braid wreaths from the flowers, and she overheard Liesl say, "I never heard of edelweiss blooming so late in the year. Perhaps it's a miracle." The sun was shining, and sitting in that field, so white that it seemed as if a cloud had drifted right down to the ground, with a wreath of edelweiss crowning her head, Gretl felt magical, like a woodland fairy or a forest nymph.

But as they climbed ever higher into the mountains, pleasant moments were fewer and further between. The mountain-top views that had left her speechless at first became boring to Gretl. She was tired of looking around and seeing only mountains, wilderness, and sky. How she missed seeing streets, houses, and buildings. Most of all, she was tired of walking. Even though her father carried her sometimes, there was still so much walking – endless walking uphill and downhill, over stones and streams, through brambles and underbrush. The clear, level ground never lasted long. Gretl felt that they walked further everyday. Would they never reach Switzerland?

She looked forward to every evening, when they could finally stop for the day. A few days into their journey, when Father thought that they were far enough from Salzburg that no one would see the smoke, he and Friederich built a fire. They all sat in a circle around the fire, singing and telling stories, and Gretl held her hands out to the flames and felt so safe and warm. Being warm helped her to forget that she was usually hungry; even though her father and older brothers hunted and fished as often as they could, and Maria and Liesl were good at finding berries and nuts whenever they passed through a forest, rations were meager split between the nine of them. How Gretl missed feeling __full___._

The worst part of the day was waking up in the morning. The temperatures dropped due to the altitude, especially at night, and the ground was so hard and cold to sleep on that even beside a fire, beneath a blanket, with Marta and Brigitta close on either side of her, Gretl woke up shivering in the mornings, and sometimes, she couldn't remember right away why she wasn't at home in her bed. They'd left it so suddenly.

_Home_. Gretl wanted nothing more than to go_ home_, to sleep in her own bed – or any _real_ bed, at least – but for some reason that she didn't really understand, they couldn't. They were on their way to Switzerland now, to live there. During the endless long days of walking, she and Marta liked to imagine what Switzerland would be like.

"Do you think there will be beds in Switzerland, when we get there?"

"I think so. I want to sleep in a big warm bed with blankets and feather pillows."

"Me, too. And I want to eat some roast chicken, and then a great slice of black forest cake, until I can't even another bite."

"Me, too. I hope they'll have those foods in Switzerland. And I hope they'll have toys. Do you think they will?"

"I think so."

One night, it rained too hard for her father to build a fire. They happened to be in a forest on a hillside when the dark rainclouds started to gather overhead, and her parents and oldest siblings scrambled to find shelter for all of them. There was a thicket, with just enough room to crawl beneath, whose branches were thick enough that they could provide cover for a few of them. Father and Friedrich built a rough lean-to out of branches, that could cover a few more.  
>Maria was quite relieved when she found the hollow log on the forest floor. It was just big enough that Gretl and Marta could squeeze inside and lie there, side by side. "You'll be perfectly dry and cozy," Maria said, trying to cheer them up, as she brushed dead leaves out of the log. "You can make-believe you're a rabbit in its hole."<p>

Gretl tried to be brave because she was a big girl now – five years old, practically a lady – but it was hard. The log was so dark and gloomy, and the inside of it smelt awful, like dirt and rotten wood. Gretl was terrified that there were spiders. How she hated spiders. The rough bark poked her, and even though they stayed mostly dry, some cold rain dripped in through cracks in the wood. Never in her life had Gretl felt so miserable.

She thought that surely, that rainy night inside the log would be the worst night of their journey through the mountains. But she was wrong. The very next night, the weather was pleasant and warm. Father said that they were descending now, and surely they would come across some little Swiss village soon. He went hunting that evening – Gretl heard his gun fire from far away – and returned with quite a lot of meat to cook over the fire.

What a difference it made, to be warm and have enough food to eat. Gretl hummed happily during dinner, for climbing the mountains on foot wasn't so bad, after all. She didn't notice when Father and Maria moved away from the fire, as they always did to talk about grown-up things, but she couldn't help overhearing when her father said, "...should last us until we find some sign of civilization. I was lucky to have shot that rabbit."

The piece of meat that Gretl was chewing fell from her hands, and since there was no table or even a plate, it landed right in the dirt beneath her feet. A _rabbit_. Her father had shot and killed a_ rabbit_ – and even worse, she was now eating it. Her stomach tossed, as if she were about to throw up.

Gretl wasn't stupid; she knew, of course, that all meat came from animals. But eating a cow or a pig was hardly the same as eating a rabbit. Rabbits were her favorite things. Maria had once asked her what things she liked, and Gretl had giggled and answered, "Bunny rabbits."

She cried herself to sleep that night. Father and Maria let her sleep between them when they saw how upset she was, and even though Maria held her and asked her what was wrong, Gretl could not find the words to tell her. She slept even worse than she had during that cold, rainy night inside the log, and at one point, half-awake, she heard her father say, "If she's sick... if it's something serious..." He actually sounded frightened. Gretl had never heard or seen her father frightened before.

But Maria just stroked her hair and said calmly, instinctively, "I don't think she's sick. She's just having a hard time of it."

They came across a little Swiss village the very next day. It looked perfectly adorable from a distance, tucked into a mountain valley, with the steeple of its church shining in the sun. They all cheered and exclaimed, for now they were safe in Switzerland, and finally in civilization again. But as they made their way towards the village and their new lives in a foreign land, Gretl understood in her heart, without even realizing it, that the five-year-old girl coming out of the mountains was not the same five-year-old girl who'd first gone into them. _She_ was not the same girl who'd been frightened of a thunderstorm only a few months ago. For along with her old life, she had left that little girl behind, somewhere among the Alps, between Switzerland and Austria.

**FIN**

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><p>Well, I've gotten the von Trapps out of Austria and into Switzerland. From here, they're on their own. Thanks SO much to everyone who's come along on this journey. I'd never written <em>Sound of Music<em> fanfiction before, and it was very rewarding. I'll probably write for this fandom again in the future. :)**  
><strong>


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